Farmers’ participation in incentivized conservation programs: Exploring barriers and opportunities for innovative designs

Farmers must widely adopt conservation practices if the agricultural system is to become more sustainable. In the United States, federal, state, nonprofit, and private efforts focus on encouraging voluntary adoption through incentive programs. Toward increasing the adoption of conservation practices, it is critical to gain a better understanding of farmers’ past experiences with existing voluntary incentive programs and how they feel programs can be improved going froward to enable greater and more meaningful participation. To offer preliminary insight into these research needs, our study draws on interviews with 10 dairy farmers in the key agricultural county of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In focusing on this regional context and farming segment, our work offers needed insight into this population’s views on conservation programs and decision-making more generally. Farmers in our sample noted several challenges with current programs that limited wider participation. Programs were seen to enable, rather than directly motivate behavior change. Farmers felt that existing programs at least implicitly overemphasized agriculture’s role in environmental problems and they noted that enrollment complexity, long timelines, and the requirement of upfront spending reduced participation. Toward improvement, interviewees felt private sector agricultural organizations can help facilitate program participation through direct engagement, that the communication of the environmental impact of farmers’ actions could be a participation incentive in itself, and that dairy producers could be better supported by programs that reward environmental achievements via paying more for their milk. These findings advance the existing social science literature on conservation program participation generally, while offering the detailed information about a specific farm type in a specific geography. Our results therefore afford insights that can contribute toward developing targeted engagement and implementation projects, while also offering foundational data toward future research and eventual policy innovation.